Exploring Identity Through Ai-Generated Selfies: Digital Selfie Creation - Beth Rowsell

 

 

 My experience in creating this AI selfie was honestly quite odd and unsettling. As this was my first time ever using AI to generate an image, I was not really sure what to expect. Therefore, I just ended up just listing my physical traits. If you look at this photo from very far away and squint, you could maybe think that this is a picture of me, though I think it is quite far from actuality. The faces in AI generated photos always look uncanny to me, which I believe is because of the faces usually being generated as perfectly symmetrical. There are no impurities or imperfections, the skin is smooth with not a pore in sight. 

To me, identity is so many things, so many things that transcend physical appearances. It was very challenging to try and incorporate different themes in my photo. There were multiple occasions where something I added to the prompt was basically ignored. I ended up settling on more things with 'my' appearance that the AI would actually pick up on, like clothing, jewellery, and the background. The article by Chubb, J. et al. (2022) references the unknown and therefore scary future of generative AI, which is realistic since AI has been evolving at such a rapid pace. The differences in AI from 2022 versus present day are immense, and it will likely continue to rapidly develop in the coming years. We cannot possibly anticipate or predict the future of something that is so unpredictable. One of my many opinions on generative AI, is one that argues that AI does not actually create anything. It picks and sorts through things that already exist. So is there really such a thing as an AI narrative?